Open source software enables Google to build things quickly and efficiently without reinventing the wheel, allowing us to focus on solving new problems. We stand on the shoulders of giants and we know it. This is why we support open source and make it easy for Googlers to release the projects they’re working on internally as open source.

Today we’re sharing our first Open Source Report Card, highlighting our most popular projects, sharing a few statistics and detailing some of the projects we’ve released in 2016.

Guava - a set of Java core libraries that includes new collection types (such as multimap and multiset), immutable collections, a graph library, functional types, an in-memory cache, and APIs/utilities for concurrency, I/O, hashing, primitives, reflection, string processing and much more.

Yeoman - a robust and opinionated set of scaffolding tools including libraries and a workflow that can help developers quickly build beautiful and compelling web applications.

While it’s difficult to measure the full scope of open source at Google, we can use the subset of projects that are on GitHub to gather some interesting data. Today our GitHub footprint includes over 84 organizations and 3,499 repositories, 773 of which were created this year.

Googlers use countless languages from Assembly to XSLT, but what are their favorites? GitHub flags the most heavily used language in a repository and we can use that to find out. A survey of GitHub repositories shows us these are some of the languages Googlers use most often:

With this, we learn that Googlers have made 142,527 commits to open source projects on GitHub since the start of the year. This dataset goes back to 2011 and we can tweak this query to find out that Googlers have made 719,012 commits since then. Again, this is just a baseline number as it doesn’t count commits made with other email addresses.

Looking back at the projects we’ve open-sourced in 2016 there’s a lot to be excited about. We have released open source software, hardware and datasets. Let’s take a look at some of this year’s releases.

SeesawSeesaw is a Linux Virtual Server (LVS) based load balancing platform developed in Go by our Site Reliability Engineers. Seesaw, like many projects, was built to scratch our own itch.

From our blog post announcing its release: “We needed the ability to handle traffic for unicast and anycast VIPs, perform load balancing with NAT and DSR (also known as DR), and perform adequate health checks against the backends. Above all we wanted a platform that allowed for ease of management, including automated deployment of configuration changes.”

Vendor Security Assessment Questionnaire (VSAQ)
We assess the security of hundreds of vendors every year and have developed a process to automate much of the initial information gathering with VSAQ. Many vendors found our questionnaires intuitive and flexible, so we decided to shared them. The VSAQ Framework includes four extensible questionnaire templates covering web applications, privacy programs, infrastructure as well as physical and data center security. You can learn more about it in our announcement blog post.

OpenThreadOpenThread, released by Nest, is a complete implementation of the Thread protocol for connected devices in the home. This is especially important because of the fragmentation we’re seeing in this space. Development of OpenThread is supported by ARM, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and other major vendors.

Magenta
Can we use machine learning to create compelling art and music? That’s the question that animates Magenta, a project from the Google Brain team based on TensorFlow. The aim is to advance the state of the art in machine intelligence for music and art generation and build a collaborative community of artists, coders and machine learning researchers. Read the release announcement for more information.

Omnitone
Virtual reality (VR) isn’t nearly as immersive without spatial audio and much of VR development is taking place on proprietary platforms. Omnitone is an open library built by members of the Chrome Team that brings spatial audio to the browser. Omnitone builds on standard Web Audio APIs to deliver an immersive experience and can be used alongside projects like WebVR. Find out more in our blog post announcing the project’s release.

Science Journal
Today’s smartphones are packed with sensors that can tell us interesting things about the world around us. We launchedScienceJournal to help educators, students and citizen scientists tap into those sensors. You can learn more about the project in our announcement blog post.

Recently we launched a new eBook called "The No-Nonsense Guide to Native Ads", the latest in our No-Nonsense series. This guide is designed to provide a comprehensive overview of native ads and share practical tips and best practices for implementing native ads in your app.

Over the last several years, app users have raised their expectations for a high quality app UX. To meet these expectations, ad formats have evolved accordingly. The most fitting new format that meets these higher expectations is native ads – ads that match the look and feel of the surrounding app content. And as spending on native ads is expected to grow to $21 billion in 2018, this presents a huge opportunity for publishers to enhance their user experience and tap into new revenues.

In the eBook, you’ll learn:

Guiding design principles that will help you better implement native ads

Practical tips and best practices for implementing native ads with lots of examples

Welcome to the Polymer Summit livestream 2016. Today, we’ll kick off with a keynote about how the core Polymer team is thinking about the project’s past, present, and future. We’ll follow with a full day of sessions covering every aspect of building great web applications using Polymer, including a unique new Polymer experience, and thoughts from our partners. Tune into the livestream below to follow along. We look forward to engaging in the conversation with you at #PolymerSummit.

At Google I/O, we announced our ongoing investment in Blockly with the release of a native Android version. We also highlighted significant improvements to the performance of web Blockly, which enables better rendering performance on mobile devices. Now iOS developers will have access to an open-source developer preview of Blockly for iOS that supports building better experiences on mobile, including multi-touch and enhanced animations as new experimental features.

Today’s release supports our ongoing efforts to enable developers to create consistent, high-quality, beginner programming experiences - as block-based programming interfaces can make coding more accessible by removing syntax errors and supporting “tinkerability.” We believe that coding is more than just a set of technical skills; coding is a valuable tool for everyone, empowering users from around the globe to imagine, invent, and explore.

Blockly Turtle running on iOS

With Blockly for iOS, developers can add Blockly views and fragments directly into their iOS app. This will offer tighter integration and improved performance compared to using a WebView. In this developer preview, blocks are currently optimized for tablets, but ready to customize for any app.

In addition, if you already use Blockly we're releasing a major update to the tools for creating custom blocks and configuring Blockly for your app, check out the new Blockly Developer Tools. The new tools allow you to edit and maintain a library of custom blocks, quickly configure toolboxes, and export and import files to local storage.

Click here to learn more, and get started on Blockly for iOS today. And to share feedback and get news, we welcome you to join the Blockly mailing list. We look forward to seeing your future builds!

One of the goals of the Open Source Programs Office is to encourage more people to contribute to open source software. One way we achieve that goal is through our student programs, Google Summer of Code (for university students) and Google Code-in (for pre-university students).

Over 15,000 students from more than 100 countries have worked with 23,000 mentors and contributed to 560+ open source projects.

This is why we’re excited to announce the next round of both of our student programs!

Google Code-in begins for students November 28, 2016

For the seventh consecutive year, Google Code-in will give students (ages 13-17) a chance to explore open source. Students will find opportunities to learn and get hands on experience with tasks from a range of categories. This structure allows students to stretch themselves as they take on increasingly more challenging tasks.

Getting started is easy: once the contest begins, simply choose an interesting task from our participating organizations’ lists and complete it. Mentors from the organizations are available to help online.

Google Code-in is for students asking questions like:

What is open source?

What kinds of stuff do open source projects do?

How can I write real code when all I’ve done is a little classroom work?

Can I contribute even if I’m not really a programmer?

With tasks in five different categories, there’s something to fit almost any student’s skills:

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) provides university students from around the world with an opportunity to take their skills and hone them by contributing to open source projects during their summer break from university.

Students gain invaluable experience working with mentors on these open source software projects, earning a stipend upon successful completion of their project.

We’re proud to keep this tradition going: we’ll be opening student applications for Google Summer of Code 2017 on March 20, 2017. Applications for interested open source organizations open on January 19, 2017.

Students, it’s never too early to start preparing or thinking about your proposal. You can learn about the organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code 2016 and the projects students worked on. We also encourage you to explore other resources like the student and mentor manuals and frequently asked questions.

The Polymer Summit is almost here! We’ll kick off live from Tobacco Dock, London at 10:00AM GMT this coming Monday, October 17th. To get the most out of the event, make sure to check out the speaker list and talk schedule on our site.

Can’t join us in person? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! You can tune into the summit live on www.polymer-project.org/summit. We will stream the keynote and all sessions over the course of the event. If you want us to send you a reminder to tune into the livestream, sign up here.

Subscribe to the Chrome Developers YouTube Channel to stay up to date as we’ll be publishing all of the talks from the event here.

We’re looking forward to seeing you in person or remotely on Tuesday. Don’t forget to join the social conversations at #PolymerSummit.

A big challenge in sharing digital information around the world is “tofu”—the blank boxes that appear when a computer or website isn’t able to display text: ⯐. Tofu can create confusion, a breakdown in communication, and a poor user experience.

Five years ago we set out to address this problem via the Noto—aka “No more tofu”—font project. Today, Google’s open-source Noto font family provides a beautiful and consistent digital type for every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters.

Caption: A few samples of the 110,000+ characters covered by Noto fonts.

The Noto project started as a necessity for Google’s Android and Chrome OS operating systems. When we began, we did not realize the enormity of the challenge. It required design and technical testing in hundreds of languages, and expertise from specialists in specific scripts. In Arabic, for example, each character has four glyphs (i.e., shapes a character can take) that change depending on the text that comes after it. In Indic languages, glyphs may be reordered or even split into two depending on the surrounding text.

The key to achieving this milestone has been partnering with experts in the field of type and font design, including Monotype, Adobe, and an amazing network of volunteer reviewers. Beyond “no more tofu” in the common languages used every day, Noto will be used to preserve the history and culture of rare languages through digitization. As new characters are introduced into the Unicode standard, Google will add these into the Noto font family.

Google has a deep commitment to openness and the accessibility and innovation that come with it. The full Noto font family, design source files, and the font building pipeline are available for free at the links below. In the spirit of sharing and communication across borders and cultures, please use and enjoy!

As a child I was surrounded by the commercial design and pop-cultural art of Japan. I played with Transformer robot toys, pumped quarters into Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, watched Star Blazers (Yamato) and Robotech (Macross) cartoons after school, and listened to mix-tapes on my Sony Walkman.

In art school, I became fascinated by the creative dialog of the late 1800s, where western artists drew inspiration from their peers in Asia. The flattening of perspective and embrace of the two-dimensional graphic qualities of the image were revolutionary at the time, and would lay the foundation for the great modernist movements of painting and design in the West.

These influences can be found in Material Design, our comprehensive system for visual, motion, and interaction design across all platforms and all devices. Material Design continues to evolve but, at its core, it relies on the foundations of good graphic and print design – clear typography, systematic layout, thoughtful application of scale, intentional use of color and white space, and foreground imagery. Working together these elements do far more than please the eye. They create hierarchy, meaning, and focus attention on content.

Yesterday, I was in Tokyo to host SPAN, our annual design event that engages the many ways design and technology shape our everyday lives. SPAN Tokyo provides us with an opportunity to honor the influence of Japanese art and culture on Material Design, as we highlight the most inspiring local designers and broader creative community. In anticipation of the event, we have translated our Material Design Guidelines into Japanese which we are please to announce are available for download starting today (material.google.com/jp). This document is a first step towards making Material Design a conversation that includes our Japanese friends. Furthermore, it is a symbol of our commitment to continuing this dialog of design throughout Asia.

With that in mind, we’ve organized SPAN Tokyo to feature a broad range of practitioners contributing to the contemporary visual cultural happening in Japan today—from art generated through machine learning and neural networks, to start-up culture, ikebana, type design, and much more. We’re honored to have been joined by this esteemed group of speakers, including London Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic, illustrator Mariya Suzuki, artist Keiichi Tanaami, and many more.

Originally posted on Inside AdMob blogPosted by Chris Jones, Social Team, AdMob.
Native is the next big thing in mobile advertising with spending on native ads expected to grow to $21 billion in 2018. This is a huge potential opportunity for app developers, but how can you use native ads to help boost your UX and monetize your app? Here’s a quick overview of what native advertising is, and how you can get started.

What’s Native?
Native advertisements match both the form and function of the user experience in which they’re placed. They also match the visual design of the app they live within. Native ads augment the user experience by providing value through relevant ads that flow within the context of surrounding app content. Put simply; native ads fit in.

Native advertising isn’t a new thing.
Since the golden days of wireless radio and daily newspapers, advertisers have looked for innovative ways to match up their brands and messages with the environment in which they’re served to consumers. In the digital advertising world, Google was one of the first “native” advertisers, developing search ads that directly matched the information on the search results page.

But today, consumers are everywhere.
And we’ve had to adapt; delivering higher quality content that can flex to different screens and sizes. For example, mobile-optimized websites now have big buttons and fonts and mobile apps let users scroll up and down or left and right, rather than having to click through to the pages they want to view. Native also understands that preserving that user experience is vital to successful advertising.

Our content has evolved, and our ads need to follow.
Nobody likes their app experience to be side-swiped by an obtrusive, ugly ad. Native advertising offers a simple solution: ads that fit the form and function of a developer’s content. We help you create ads that are beautiful and engaging, so consumers can maintain their good buzz.

Native ads are cohesive.
They never stand out like a sore thumb. They’re made to match the look and feel of the app, and are consistent with platform behavior, so that the viewer feels like the ad fits seamlessly with their content experience. In other words - they’re ads with UX in mind.

Here at Google, we’re serving more than a hundred APIs to ensure that developers
have the resources to build amazing experiences with them. We provide a reliable
infrastructure and make it as simple as possible so developers can focus on
building the future. With this in mind, we’re introducing a few improvements for
the API experience: more flexible keys, a streamlined 'getting-started'
experience, and easy monitoring.

Faster, more flexible key generation

Keys are a standard way for APIs to identify callers, and one of the very first
steps in interacting with a Google API. Tens of thousands of keys are created
every day for Google APIs, so we’re making this step simpler -- reducing the old
multi-step process with a single click:

You no longer need to choose your platform and various other restrictions at the
time of creation, but we still encourage scope management
as a best practice:

Streamlined getting started flow

We realize that many developers want to get straight to creation and don’t
necessarily want to step into the console. We’ve just introduced an in-flow
credential set up procedure directly embedded within the developer
documentation:

Click the 'Get a Key' button, choose or create a project, and then let us take
care of enabling the API and creating a key.

We are currently rolling this out for the Google Maps APIs and over the next few
months we'll bring it to the rest of our documentation.

API Dashboard

We’re not just making it easier to get started, we’re simplifying the
on-going usage experience, too. For developers who use one or more APIs
frequently, we've built the new API Dashboard to
easily view usage and quotas.

If you’ve enabled any APIs, the dashboard is front and center in the API
Console. There you can view all the APIs you’re using along with usage, error
and latency data:

Clicking on an API will jump to a detailed report, where you’ll see the traffic
sliced by methods, credentials, versions and response code (available on select
APIs):

We hope these new features make your API usage easier, and we can't wait to see
what you’re going to build next!